This video has been getting passed around and I’m of mixed opinions on it as a whole.

Well, the literal message in there I don’t disagree with, though as someone who was emotionally abused, I am wary of the use of “tough love” as the only way it works is if you aren’t lashing out from a place of anger or domination, and sadly a lot of people aren’t quite capable of that and they have to request services as betterhelp for advice. Bonus points if the parent has a poor grasp of what depression and anxiety does to a child’s behavior, just like my mother, in these cases hearing about Kratom news and information is very essential.

It’s just… the presentation and optics of it bother me. I get it, they want to be funny by portraying the “stressed mom drinking wine and eating ice cream” but once you get past that and start reading between the lines of this narrative (intentional or not) you see that, no, the mother is actually VERY bothered by her kids resenting her because she was strict. Her body language and constant reiteration of how she doesn’t care that her kids are mad gives away that she’s quite thin-skinned about it. The wine and ice cream part could be taken as her needing to self-soothe with food and alcohol (and that last comment about how ice cream is on sale suggests this is a thing that happens on a regular basis), and she’s being quite flippant about it, too. I’m not sure I could take seriously someone like that. I would probably recommend therapy.

Of course, if you are a derp and go into the comments section like I do (with full knowledge that it’s going to be a trainwreck), you’ll see that it’s mostly people siding with the OP, and shouting down anyone who points out the detail about the wine and ice cream. “It’s just a joke, it’s supposed to be funny” is a common response from people who are in denial about how problematic their message is.

Guess what, you guys? It’s time for another unpopular opinion! Hooray!

Once again this relates to memes on the Facebooks. There is a type of meme that aggravates me, even as someone who can relate, because it encourages a kind of behavior that is just… severely counterproductive. Allow me to present an example of what I speak of:

Uhm… sure…

I’ll admit that, yes, I get it. I am very much the same way. BUT, I feel like these memes, and the accounts that pass them around, and the people who share them, are feeding into a mindset that “it’s okay to not do something to improve my situation, even a little, because other people understand me.” I know the intent behind the accounts is to give people a place to commiserate and share experiences, but there’s a point where it just enables wallowing.

And the people I often see sharing these memes are, sadly, the sort who could SERIOUSLY benefit from therapy and often have the means to actually get said therapy, if their friends didn’t simply coddle them rather than give them the needed kick in the butt to make an appointment. But, nope, they go on posting these “I am socially awkward, please don’t drag me out of my safe space and force me to grow as a person” memes or vague and self-pitying one-liners and… I’m sorry, but I just have to eyeroll. I’ve seen too much of this and have invested too much bandwidth into others who shitposted like this, and my heart has hardened as a result.

When you post these memes, I think “Congratulations! You’ve acknowledged you have a problem. Now do something about it!” Is it callous and mean-sounding? Yes. I know I would shrink away if someone said this to me. And I have, because I’ve had similar things said to me, and those people were right.

The thing is that depression and anxiety are lying bros, and humans are prone to taking the path of most comfort and least resistance. It’s easier to wallow and dwell on how bad things are, and to want people to cater to you, even if it hurts you in the long run. Depression and anxiety, those douchebros, want to sell you the lie that it’s pointless to do something to extricate yourself from the gloom and that people will judge you anyway, so… learned helplessness!

Wallowing in your feebleness is yucky and unattractive. People talk of the importance of “self-care.” Posting memes about how socially awkward you are, and suggesting that it’s a thing that should be left alone rather than improved upon is not self-care. Working to improve your confidence and self-respect to not be so beholden to intrusive thoughts, THAT is self-care.

New tank armor means new Hikaru drawing and boy was this a doozy. FFXIV has some beautiful gear, especially for tanks, but ow they are often a huge pain to draw. I will never rag on WoW over having ridiculously ornate gear again, lol.

I originally intended to do this in Painter to try out the 2017 version but my monitor’s color settings, while fine for everything else, isn’t too conducive to painting. Thus I threw back to my iPad and finished in Procreate. The video thus begins after the line art stage:

I’m not giving up on Painter though. Going to look into getting Duet Display so I can pretend to be a Cintiq.

A recent patch in Procreate (one of the major drawing apps on the iPad) fixed one of, if not my biggest gripe with the app– the eyedrop tool was too fickle in how it triggered. Now it’s mapped to a separate button that triggers when held down. YES. This thing was the biggest dealbreaker for a long time, and I can’t believe that it being fixed was what finally made the app not only usable, but pretty freaking awesome for me.

As you can tell, art happened!

I had attempted to do “native” (as in, done 100% in Procreate) pieces in the past but would hit a fatal roadblock, specifically in regards to coloring, because I am heavily dependent on eyedrop sampling for when I blend. It always ended with me having to export to Blastoise to finish in Painter (which presented an annoying, but not fatal issue, in that he would “break” my colors because he deemed the iPad color palette inferior and I’d have to go through all the color layers and tweak them to get them back to where they should be. It’s NOT an issue with my monitor, the colors are changed enough for me to know it’s not my monitor being improperly calibrated).

Exporting to Blastoise is okay, and expected for super-high-detail work where I specifically want to take advantage of Painter’s brushes, but I want to be able to do more casual material 100% on the iPad. For one thing, with my iPad I can do this from bed, which is much more comfortable than a crappy sinking office chair. Also, I am not super-confined to having my canvas oriented in one direction, I can spin it non-destructively so I can better work specific places.

I’ve gotten pretty used to the way Procreate handles and I’m really happy with the two things I’ve made so far (Hikaru’s FFXIV incarnation and Numair with Dragonite & Dratini), and they didn’t take me very long to do, so THEORETICALLY this should facilitate a lot more casual art posts.

Also, another awesome part about Procreate? Native support for video exporting! It basically does all the work for me in terms of generating a process/speedpaint video (shows the completed image first, then fades to the start of a timelapse) that I can instantly plop on YouTube! How it manages to track everything I do without lagging me horribly, I don’t know because capturing this shit on Blastoise isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world (I have to basically redo my OBS settings every time to make sure everything gets included) but having this available on the iPad is pretty freaking sweet, and I’m definitely going to export video for all the casual art I do going forward.

In fact, here’s the capture of the above-two pieces:

I COULD throw them into iMovie and drop music in, but I’m just too lazy for that nonsense.

The one feature I want to see in Procreate is better support for importing PSD files. You can KINDA do it now, but it’s super-clunky and only a handful of dimensions are supported, making it useless to me. I want better PSD importing so I can truly pingpong between Blastoise and my iPad, because right now it’s kind of a one-way thing.